


After the Levee Breaks

by TrivialPursuit



Category: Argo (2012)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Multiple Personalities, Post-Film, historical fiction - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-02
Updated: 2013-10-02
Packaged: 2017-12-28 04:45:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/987807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrivialPursuit/pseuds/TrivialPursuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He tells her she's doing fine, that she'll be great. But she's not worried about that, she's never been worried about that. She is, however, terrified that she will never stop.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After the Levee Breaks

**Author's Note:**

> Yay! I get to be the first work in this fandom!

 

I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it becomes.

-Vladimir Nabokov

 

~

She dreams about sitting in the crawlspace as boots thumped overhead and Mark rubbing circles on her wrist even as his breath beats an unsteady tattoo across the side of her face. 

After, when whoever it was had gone, Ken would help them out. ' _Ladies first_ ' had always been insisted on the beginning, but but the time He came all such pretences of nicety were long since abandon.

 

~

  
When she can't get to sleep, she practices. (' _Marion Voight, screenwriter._ '  _'Diefenbaker, Pearson, Trudeau._ ') Sometimes, when she wakes up in the morning she's sure Cora's the lie and Marion's the truth. 

(Sometimes she thinks she should add ' _Clark, Trudeau, Turner, Mulroney_ ' to the list but never quite remembers to.)

 

~

  
She keeps up with the news back home even when she and her husband are sent to first Marrakech then Istanbul. Cora never cared for politics,  but Marion always pays attention, carefully mining the world around her for inspiration.

(She thinks about writing a movie sometimes, about what, she's not really sure, but Marion had dreams, dammit, and she's going to fulfil her dreams.)

 

~

  
She asks about practice and really just wants to wrap him in her arms and tell him it'll be alright, or maybe wrap herself in his arms and ask if she'll survive tomorrow. But she doesn't.

He tells her she's doing fine, that she'll be great. But she's not worried about that, she's never been worried about that. She may have difficulty with the dates and places, but  _being_  Marion was never a problem for her.

She was, however, terrified that she would never stop.

 

~

_She has this dream sometimes, where she's sitting watching as her fortune is laid out on a before her, the Marseilles deck making soft swishes on the table. The room smells dusty and the tent is old and tired, groaning in the worsening wind. The fortune teller is a skinny, pale girl in a dirty white shift that has seen better days with dark brown hair and features that are oddly shadowed._

_'Le Bateleur' the fortune teller says, voice soft, almost a whisper, though it nearly knocks her off her chair with its power._

_'Le Pendu' another card hits the table, this one depicting a hanged man, his tongue lolling grotesquely from his mouth._

_'La Maison Dieu.'_

_'La Papesse'_

_'L'Amoureux'_

_'But what does it all mean?'_

_At this, the fortune teller raises her face, and the fortune teller has her face and she is laying out there cards._

 

~

  
They don't see any of the others anymore, and she is never sure if this relieves or saddens her. They weren't her favourite people at the embassy but they also had a bond of shared experience. So maybe they should have stayed in touch. (Or maybe not, she's not sure if she could stomach any more of Joe's whining.)

Mostly she doesn't wonder what Robert's doing right now or if the Staffords have had any kids. Mostly she wonders what Tony is doing. She remembers he had a son and a wife who'd left him. ' _I have a son._ ', he'd said, the wife was implicit and the hollow sadness in his eyes showed that all was not well in the marital bed.

Sometimes, when her husband is out with his friends, she hates the lucky bitch who gets to be Mrs Tony Mendez, sometimes, when she's had a few to many glasses of wine she's that self same lucky bitch. And he's not a cakewalk either and neither is she, but despite any imagined Fleming-eques exotics, there's no fear. Well, that's not true, there is fear, but there's no fear of being bored, no fear of apathy, no fear of being held at arm's length, at being treated like glass.

Eventually Mark comes home and she's back to being apathetic glass.

(She thinks it's safer that way.)

 

~

_Scene, a woman, CAROLINE, sits across from JACK, in a diner._

_CAROLINE: I'm not sure if I can be me anymore. I'm so tired of me._

_JACK: Then don't be you, be something else. Be Natalia, the Soviet spy, be Marie, the French queen, be a damn meteor if you want._

_(Beat)_

_CAROLINE: Let's run away together._

_JACK: Why?_

_CAROLINE: Why not? We could be anything. You could sleep at night and I could be happy._

_JACK: What would we do?_

_CAROLINE: Anything. But we would never be bored._

_JACK: We could be Charles and Alice Dodgson, groundbreaking mathematicians._

_CAROLINE: Or Peter and Harriet Vane, private detectives._

_JACK: Or Anna and Alexei Oblonsky, mysterious millionaires. We could be anyone._

_CAROLINE: We could be everyone._

 

~

  
Marion's always had a little fire in her blood, and maybe so did Cora, but Mark is earth because earth is stable and warm without being dangerous.

(She's always needed a little danger in her life.)

 

~

  
She writes her movie.


End file.
